Your Word is Truth

I. Introduction
A. On New Years Day we began a new series on the Bible, in recognition of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.
B. However long God allows me the privilege of ministering His word to you, I want to stress the things I believe are most important. That’s why I’m preaching this series.
1. I strongly urge the young to pay special attention to this series.
2. Your confidence in the word of God will be tested.
3. My goal is to prepare you as well as I can for those tests.
4. If you apply yourself to this series, you will get a pretty good foundation for thinking about, dealing with, feeding on and defending the word of God going into the future.
5. A couple I gave premarital counseling to many years ago said that now they wish they could go back and listen over again. Now they realize how much they needed the things we talked about. But it’s too late.
6. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. When the time comes and you really need to know this stuff, it will be too late.
C. The high priestly prayer — prayed right before He led His disciples to the garden of Gethsemane
1. He prays for His disciples, and for all who will come to faith through their testimony.
II. John 17:17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
A. God is in the business of transforming His people, largely through His word.
1. God’s people become sanctified by God’s word, which is the truth.
2. What does it mean to be sanctified? Sanctify is the verb of the word holy. If holify was a word in English, that’s how this would be translated. It means to make holy.
3. What does holy mean? It means set apart, special, in a different category than the rest.
4. So, God through His word is in the process of making His people special, making them different than we were and different than those outside of Christ.
5. This begins when the gospel, the word of truth, brings us to faith (James 1:18; 1Peter 1:23-25).
6. There are at least two ways that God’s people are sanctified by the truth of God’s word.
a. Hebrews 4:12 “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of arrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
b. But He doesn’t just use His word to cut out the cancerous tumors deep in their souls, He also uses His word to cut their shackles off to set them free. John 8:31–32 Jesus said, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
III. “Your word is truth.”
A. What does Jesus mean when He says “Your word is Truth”?
1. He is putting some special stress here. He doesn’t just say, “Your word is true.”
B. In his masterful article entitled “The Biblical Concept of Truth,” Roger Nicole surveyed all the usages of the word truth in the Bible. He found three different facets to the Biblical concept of truth: 1- faithfulness, 2- factuality, 3- fulfillment or reality
1. The first two are things we get. They make sense to us. God does what He says. And God speaks the truth. He doesn’t lie or deceive. So, when He promises something, He can be counted on to do it. And when He tells us something, we can count on the fact that it is true.
2. That’s what faithfulness and factuality are all about. And God’s word is factual and faithful.
3. But it’s also more than that. It’s also the third meaning of truth: fulfillment/reality.
4. When Jesus says God’s word is truth, He means more than that it’s like a calculator which always gives the right answer, or like a federally-insured investment, which will always back up its promise.
5. Those first two qualities of truth are shared to some extent with people and things. People often tell the truth. People often follow though on their promises. So do some vending machines.
6. But Truth as fulfillment is something which can only be said about God.
C. We use the word true in this way ourselves.
1. We say things like, “I may sometimes go fishing, but Jonathan Bolton is a true fisherman.”
2. Have you seen commercials which say, “Real people. Not actors.” — The job of actors is to act like real customers, but actually they’re reading a script and getting paid to do so.
3. Have you ever seen the TV Show called To Tell the Truth? They have a person who is not famous but does something relatively interesting, perhaps like a professional astronomer. And then they have two other people who pretend to be that same guy. They read up on astronomy so that they can try to fool the others into thinking they’re the real astronomer. Then some celebrities ask questions of all three of them and try to guess which is the real astronomer. And then at the very end, they say, “Will the real Dr. So-and-so please stand up!” And he does. So, you have the true astronomer and you have two astronomer pretenders.
4. You can also understand the distinction between these three meanings of truth by their opposites.
a. When you don’t tell the truth, they call you a liar.
b. When you don’t keep your promises, they call you unfaithful or a promise-breaker.
c. But when you’re not true in this third way of fulfillment or reality, they call you phony.
D. Let’s look at five truth-as-fulfillment/reality verses (see also Luke 16:11, John 4:10).
1. John 1:9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. (1Jn.2:8)
2. John 15:1 I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener.
3. John 6:32 Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. (Cf. John 6:58)
4. John 6:55 For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. (Cf. John 6:27)
5. Heb.9:23-24 It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. 24 For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God's presence.
E. In all of these we see the distinction between something which is familiar to us in our daily lives (like light, food, grape vines) or familiar to us from the Bible (like manna and the ancient temple of God in Jerusalem) and the deeper reality which lies behind those earthly things. The familiar earthly things are referred to as copies of the greater heavenly things.
F. Ultimately, when the Bible uses the word truth in this way, it is referring to Jesus as the Truth.
1. The creation is filled with copies, reflections of the Reality which is Christ.
2. Revelation 3:7 refers to the words of Christ as “the words of the holy one, the true one.”
a. You see, Jesus is uniquely true. He is true in a manner no one else and nothing else is.
3. John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
a. Jesus is not only true, He is the truth. He is the fulfillment of everything else.
b. And the I AM lends even more weight to what it says.
4. Even in John 17:17 when Jesus says, “Your word is truth” this is what He has in mind. He’s talking about God’s word which is about Him, about Jesus the Truth (John 17:8). He’s talking about the gospel.
5. He is the true riches, the true light, the true vine, the true food, the true drink, the true holy of holies, the true sacrifice, the true manna, the true prophet, the true king, the true high priest, the true life, the true father, the true rock, the true door, the true friend, the true farmer, the true bridegroom, the true son of God, the true shepherd, the true firstborn, the true mother hen, the true author, the true judge, the true morning star, the true homebuilder, the true lover, the true king of the Jews, the true anchor.
a. And we could go on just talking about things in the Bible. But it applies even to things not mentioned in the Bible. He is the true tree, the true engineer, the true playwright, the true CEO, the true family man, the true scientist, the true scholar, the true musician, the true conductor, the true choreographer, the true city planner. We could go on and on, and on and on.
b. He is true version of all things He created and declared to be very good, for they were all made to reflect Him.
6. So, the Bible is not only factual and trustworthy. It is the one book which speaks truthfully and trustworthily about the One who is the Truth with a capital T.
a. John 1:17 “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
(1) What does this mean? Was there no truth before Jesus? Were God’s promises before Jesus not trustworthy? Were the things the Bible told us about before Jesus not factual? Of course not!
b. Jesus came as the fulfillment. He came as the true prophet, priest and king. He came as the true Moses, through whom God spoke to His people. He came as the true Noah, through whose righteousness mankind was saved. He came as the true David, building God’s temple and reigning over God’s people forever.
c. “All the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.” – 2Corinthians 1:20
7. Is God real? Does God exist? Today, many people would say, “Yes, as long as we understand that God exists on a level below you and me.” In other words, they mean that God exists as a concept, like Santa or like Spiderman. These concepts can make life more liveable, more happy. And to that extent they will acknowledge Him.
a. But the Bible gives a very different answer to the question of whether God exists.
b. In the Bible, it’s not enough to say yes to the question of God’s existence.
c. God is not just real, He is reality. He doesn’t just exist, He is existence.
d. He is more real than the rest of reality. He is where everything else derives its reality.
e. Everything else is a reflection of Him, a shadow of Him, a picture of Him. He is the reality.
f. You see, I exist — and God exists. But God and I don’t exist in the same way. A shadow exists, a reflection in a mirror exists, a photograph exists. But they do not exist in the same way that the thing they reflect or picture exists. They do not exist as much as the real thing exists.
IV. What does all this tell us about what Jesus meant when He said “Your word is truth.”? This is amazing. It means that there are three ways God’s word is truth:
1. It is factual. It tells us the truth.
2. It is faithful. It can be counted on to come true. God’s promises in the Bible are trustworthy.
3. But there are other books which are factual and faithful (e.g. a math book with no mistakes). It’s the third quality of truth — fulfillment/reality — which can be said of God’s word alone. It tells us about the fulfillment of the all things. It tells us about THE truth. It tells us about the One who is the Truth.
B. The Bible isn't just about important things. This book is about the Truth. It's about the things which are truly true and really real and ultimately ultimate.
C. In order to understand what it means that God's word is truth, you have to understand that everything else is, in one sense, not truth.
D. If you live without Christ, you live without reality, without that which is real. In a sense, you don’t live in the real world.
E. You may have riches but not true riches. You may drink water, but you don’t drink living water. You may eat food, but not true food. You may see light, but you don’t see the true light. You may be alive, but you don’t have true life. You may have friends, but you don’t have the true Friend. You may have a father, but you don’t know the real Father who is in heaven.
F. You see, not everyone has eyes to see. Remember when Jesus said to Pilate, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” – John 18:37–38
1. The ironic thing about Pilate’s scoffing question “What is truth?” is that he was staring Truth in the face when he asked it.
2. Just because some people don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. We live in a world where most people don’t see the Truth. But it’s still the Truth.